Donnybrook sails to Solomons win Breezes freshen to speed finish

OUTDOORS

July 25, 1993|By Nancy Noyes | Nancy Noyes,Contributing Writer

As the sun rose over the Patuxent River yesterday, fewer than a half dozen of the 191 starters in the 13-class fleet competing in the 13th Annual Solomons Island Race had crossed the line. What light air they had disappeared altogether, bringing fear to the host Eastport Yacht Club's race committee that 13 would be unlucky and mean one of the slowest races ever.

The wind eventually filled in again from the south after 9:30 a.m. and sped throngs of spinnakered racers into the Patuxent River and across the finish line near Solomons in bunches between 10 and 11 a.m.

First over the finish line in the 55-mile race from Annapolis, which began Friday evening, was PHRF A-1 winner Jim Muldoon's Santa Cruz 70 Donnybrook, just before 3:30 a.m. Because of the long lags in time between Donnybrook's finish and that of the others in its class, Muldoon easily held his lead by a comfortable margin of more than 30 minutes corrected time over second-place finisher Jeff Klein and his team on Dragon Fly.

Although winners in many handicap classes moved into position corrected time, another team which got the gun and kept the win was Dave and Beth Scheidt and their crew on their J/24 AJ, who topped the PHRF C class by 10 minutes corrected time and 20 minutes elapsed.

"It was a beautiful night," Dave Scheidt said. "Light air on the nose [from the south] is not exactly painful for a J/24. We worked all night to be in a position to take advantage of [the new morning wind]. We were about third at sunup, and when it went totally light we made several good calls in a row. We were the first boat to realize you could fly a chute."

Scheidt said conventional wisdom for the Solomons race is that "the guy who wins is the first guy to make his last tack, but we disobeyed that. We were within five or 10 degrees of the rhumb line most of the night."